Bears attract up to 20,000 visitors to China zoo – after it denies they are humans in costume

‘After we saw the video on the Internet... we travelled overnight to get here,’ says one visitor

Tourists are flocking to see the Malaysian sun bears at a zoo in China – in the wake of the attraction having to deny that they were humans in costume.

Images of one of the bears, Angela, standing at the edge of its enclosure have been circulating on social media for a number of days. It's thin legs and the sagging of its skin led to speculation that it could be a zoo worker in an ill-fitting bear suit.

In response, Hangzhou Zoo in eastern Zhejiang province, posted on its own social media account a response written in the voice of Angela: “Some people think I stand like a person... It seems you don’t understand me very well.”

Sun bears are smaller than other bears, and look different, but are the real thing, the zoo said in the post. “When it comes to bears, the first thing that comes to mind is a huge figure and amazing power... But not all bears are behemoths and danger personified,” it added.

Sun bears are the size of large dogs, standing at most 1.3 meters (50 inches) tall on their hind legs, compared with up to 2.8 metres (9 feet) for some other species, according to the zoo.

Now, visitor numbers have gone up by 30 per cent to around 20,000 a day, the Zhejiang-based Chao News reported, with the bear having become a trending topic on Chinese social media at the weekend. "If this is fake it deserves an Oscar for special effects," said one user on the Weibo microblog platform.

"After seeing this bear standing up on the internet, I wanted to see how it looks in real life, so I came here," said a man surnamed You, who said he had only half-believed the video he saw online, Chao news reported.

"After we saw the video on the Internet, we specially took the high-speed train from Suzhou to come over to see the bear," another visitor, Qian Ming, told a Hangzhou TV station. "We travelled overnight last night to get here. The bears are so cute."

"Our zoo is government-run, so that kind of situation would not happen," a zoo spokesperson said of the internet speculation. "The temperature in the summer is nearly 40 degrees, if you put on a fur suit, you certainly couldn't last more than a few minutes without lying down."

Other Chinese zoos have been accused of trying to pass off dogs dyed to look like wolves or African cats, and donkeys painted to look like zebras.

Reuters and Associated Press have contributed to this report